A Unified Theory of Trumpism

**Jon Lovett** (0:20)
Hey everybody, welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Lovett. I just wrapped a great conversation with Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark. It went all kinds of places to what went wrong inside the Republican Party, what a post-Trump Democratic Party should be fighting for, and what it means to have a politics that centers virtues like kindness, and what happened to lead a country to a place where someone like Donald Trump could be president in the first place. I really appreciate the way Jonathan thinks and writes about politics, especially as one of the rare conservatives who understood from the beginning why it was so toxic to embrace someone as awful as Trump. I'm grateful to him for coming on the show, and I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. So here it is.
Jonathan, welcome to the show.

**Jonathan V. Last** (1:11)
Thanks for having me on finally, John.

**Jon Lovett** (1:14)
I understand that there is a text chain in which whenever Sarah Longwell or Tim Miller has been on the show, you note that you hadn't yet been invited. I'm sorry that it took this long to have you on because I am genuinely such an admirer of the way you think about politics, the way you talk about politics. And as I said to you on a sub stack, a compliment that you then wrote an essay about to kind of dispute.
I appreciate those who did something that is clearly harder than it looked, which is be honest and moral from the right or the center right in the face of Trumpism when so many refused to do that. And so I think you have a lot to say to help understand this moment. I want to talk about what you called a grand unified theory of Trumpism, which you summarized as, and I quote, the essence of Trumpism is that the other side will always choose surrender over discomfort. I want to use that to kind of help us understand a bunch of different stories. But just what do you mean by that? And what are some of the salient examples to you?

**Jonathan V. Last** (2:17)
Yeah, so I was already at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and it strikes me this is a lot of the way Trump has approached waves, hands, you know, all of it. And especially the way he approached the Republican Party. And I have to say this, I mean, Trump really did understand the Republican Party and the conservative movement much better than I did. You know, he saw those people for who they are. And one of the things he has found, even with not them, but just sort of mainstream culture, is that if forced to make uncomfortable choices, people normally choose comfort over like unpleasantness. And so this was the White House Correspondents' Dinner. They invite up onto stage this group of Wall Street Journal reporters who did fantastic reporting about Trump and the Epstein stuff. And these people come up on stage and they're like, I guess I'm supposed to shake this guy's hand. And they shake hands. And then he even, when he went and gave his speech afterwards, noted, he's like, yeah, I can believe it. These guys up here, they kill me all the time. They just come up and shake my hand. It's like, yeah, it's a little weird, isn't it? And he does that again and again. He's doing that right now about Todd Blanch with Thumb, Phyllis and John Cornyn. And they are saying, we're totally in on this Todd Blanch thing, even though he's your personal lawyer. And even though he aided and abetted the Epstein coverup, and even though it was his idea to do this slush fund, but the one thing is that we really would love, we know you said you won't do it, but if you could just write that down for us, that'd be great.
And Trump's response to this is, fuck you.
And when confronted with the fuck you, their response, I don't know if you saw this, John.

**Jon Lovett** (4:22)
This is literally where I was going next. I want to read Tom Tillis.

**Jonathan V. Last** (4:26)
So, yes.

**Jon Lovett** (4:26)
So John Cornyn and Tom Tillis have been the holdup in the Senate Judiciary Committee, just for people that haven't been following that closely. Yesterday, Thursday, they were supposed to vote on the Todd Blanch nomination. This is Trump's former personal defense attorney, the guy that met with Ghislaine Maxwell, who wants to be attorney, the guy who said that the attorney general is not independent, which was, by the way, Tillis' or Cornyn's, Tillis' red line that's now been crossed, obviously.